Author mixes Amarillo setting with the Beatles

Amarillo and an author’s love for the Beatles combine in a new novel about the dissolution of a family.

“Let It Be,” by Waco native Chad Gayle, hit stores Wednesday, telling the story of the Jansen family primarily through the perspective of mom Michelle and 10-year-old son Joseph after they’ve moved to Amarillo from East Texas.

“I was looking for a setting that would present certain challenges since they had lived in East Texas,” Gayle said. “There’s such a huge disparity between the eastern side and the western side that it just really worked, especially for ... Joseph.

“He’s particularly isolated once he moves out of East Texas into what seems to him is a huge city.”

Choosing Amarillo was a natural, Gayle said.

“My in-laws (Dr. Gary and Nedra Cash) live in Friona, so I had been to Amarillo many times before I started working on this particular book,” Gayle said. “Amarillo is unique in a variety of respect, so it just worked.”

The seeds for the novel were planted after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack on New York, where Gayle was and is still living.

“I did a lot of soul searching and really started looking at my life and the things that had happened to me,” Gayle said. “There was a dredging-up process that I went through.”

In doing so, he thought back to his parents’ divorce while, coincidentally, listening to “Let It Be,” the album that marked the beginning of the end for his favorite band.

“It really cemented the thought that this (album) could be a metaphor for the splintering of a family,” Gayle said. “I could not only use this album as a metaphor for what this family of four ... was going through, but also that each individual song could really take on ... what was going on in the characters’ heads, what these people were thinking, what these people were experiencing.”

In the process, each track on the album became a chapter in the book, each told from a different family member’s perspective, including one long chapter, “I Me Mine,” told from Michelle’s eyes.

Gayle said he was initially intimidated by writing from a woman’s point of view.

“I didn’t want to get it wrong, but I’m lucky enough to have a wonderful wife (J’Mai) who’s not only very forgiving but also very willing to read over my fiction as it’s being drafted, as it’s coming into being,” he said. “When I put something on the page and she thought it wasn’t how a woman would really react or would really think, she let me know.”

Though the novel initially was inspired by Gayle’s memories of his parents’ divorce, it’s not an autobiographical novel, he said.

“I know it’s fashionable not only for readers to read into a novelist’s work the novelist’s life, but it’s also fashionable now to put the ‘memoir’ label on everything,” he said. “Yes, my parents did get divorced, but it was a pretty minor thing, certainly not as traumatic as this book.

“If I have anything in common with (any of the characters), I probably, to be honest, have the most in common with the mother, Michelle,” he said. “She’s a very practical person but is constantly aware of what is missing in her life and the complications that arise from her trying to go out and get what is missing.”

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“Let It Be” is available now at www.amazon.com and www.barnesandnoble.com. Standard retail price: $12.95.